It would be much easier to glaze over real parts of our life. It would be easier to just continue to share on specific curated topics. However, I have always believed we were supposed to maintain a level of honesty and community here, and so today I felt like it was time to go a little more in depth about the change that has happened in our life. It indirectly and directly affects the course of where we are headed….
I have been blogging since Gabriel was a toddler. If I tried to calculate the amount of hours I have dedicated to this blog over the years it would probably blow my mind. In the beginning it was a creative outlet. A much needed place to develop design skills and feed the creative side of my brain. It developed into a part of my life I didn’t have to think much about. I was bubbling over with ideas I wanted to share. As our family grew, so did the demands of keeping this blog going. Social media came to the scene and added on an extra layer of content we had to create for. I was so deeply engrained at the habit of blogging that I just adapted. It grew to the point where I could no longer juggle both family life and design work on my own and as you know, Gabe was already becoming a big part of the work here. We made the choice to jump in together. We signed with an agency to help us manage contracts with brands, and give us some bigger opportunities we were dreaming about. We started juggling everything at a 50/50 pace. Raising kids, renovating a home, sharing it all along the way.
I have always loved my work. I love creating and I love the challenge of making the most of the life in front of you. I love connecting with all of you who are walking both similar and different paths. I loved it even more getting to do it alongside Gabe. However, life can often start to shift and bend faster than you can keep up with, and something eventually will give way underneath you. The stress and anxiety that came with producing content at the pace our agency was wanting, was something I couldn’t even recognize at first. It took a series of hard personal experiences to halt the brakes, and a take a good hard look at what was unfolding before us. As I was navigating grief over the loss of our baby, I felt my interior crumbling to pieces, I was forced to take a good hard look at my life. Well guess what? Even for the movers and shakers, you can’t force internal, spiritual, and mental shifts to peacefully move forward at the pace you desire. It has to happen in it’s own time. So I let go, and paid attention.
I wanted to listen to what God was trying to reveal, and what He was was trying to breathe into my life. Well you know what happens when you actually take time to listen? God becomes loud and clear. I could see He was trying so hard to rescue me. Rescue me from a do it all, have it all culture that can so easily seep into our mindsets. As the layers peeled back, and I felt more raw and exposed than I ever have, I started to see myself through a painful, but truthful reality. I had to face that I had become a slave to productivity and perfection. I desired to be a 110% mother and also reach goals at a 110% rate. So much so that I become accustomed to sleep deprivation, anxiety, and feeling blue. No matter how good we are at checking off to-do lists, this isn’t a life anyone should every grow accustomed to. My children are in the golden years. I didn’t want to miss any of it, and yet I felt like it was slipping through my fingers.
As you may or may not have noticed, over the last year, I took some much needed time off. I scaled way back on the amount of posts we were sharing both here and on instagram. As I have done my best to continue to share the honest and hard parts of our lives along with the good, I had a growing disconnect with the work that once brought me fulfillment. Creating, capturing, styling…it started to feel forced and staged. I think it is a result of this new pair of lenses I have been wearing lately…the ones you receive after going through loss, heartbreak, and rebuilding. I am grateful for the perspective these lenses have given me as hard as they were to receive, because for the first time in my womanhood I feel like I can actually SEE. I can see my children, my husband, and myself with much greater depth and appreciation.
I would say that there are a good portion of us who struggle every day with the guilt of the imbalanced scale of our lives. We go to bed wondering if we were emotionally there for our kids the way they needed us to. We wake up with a looming list longer than we know is possible to achieve. We put in a days work, struggle to get dinner on the table, and stay present and cheerful for bedtime routine. We struggle to keep the dang floors clutter-free for all of ten minutes. So this year has been the year of self forgiveness. It’s about recognizing my strengths and weaknesses and paying attention to them. It’s about re-building and restructuring mindsets I was once dedicated to. It has been the year of letting go and lowering expectations. It’s a year of growing a little life inside of me. It’s a year of feeding my mind, body, and soul so that I can pour into my children and my spouse the way I have always wanted. It’s a year of being okay with not having all the answers. We don’t always have the luxury of taking time to breathe, so I am grateful for the chance to do so.
I think we are all still navigating this newer age of media, and I still believe it can be used for good! Thank you for reading, and being a part of our community here.
